Abstract
In May 1968, a juvenile movement embodied a new brand of socialist culture and challenged old institutions in the status quo. Since then, an ageism philosophy has been established. This pro-youth paradigm is one of the main hypotheses in Diario de la Guerra del Cerdo (Adolfo Bioy Casares, Argentina, 1969). The novel depicts a dystopian world where the population attacks aged people under an increasing reign of gerontophobia. Over fifty years later, elderly generations became the primary victim of the lockdown enacted by governments to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Ironically, the governments now discussed how intense the restrictions should be to “protect” that very generation that once incarnated the “spirit of freedom.” El Agente topo (Maite Alberdi, Chile, 2020) dives into how, due to decades of cultural ageism, youth-centered societies struggle to better understand the private life of older adults. While El Diario de la Guerra demonstrates the rejection of “the old” that was cultivated in the 1960s, El Agente Topo shows cultural blindness to the reality of elders as a result of that hostility. This paper explores intergenerational relationships during extreme contexts such as revolutions and pandemics.
Presenters
Camilo Gonzalez SantosStudent, PhD Candidate, Tulane University, Louisiana, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Literature, Cinema, Age, Representations, Politics, Fiction, Discursivities
